In a presentation by EMC storage and security division president Pat Gelsinger and a blog by Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis, EMC outlined its vision for a globally distributed storage network that overcomes limitations of latency, bandwidth and data consistency.

The executives suggested that the vision could soon become a product, promising more details at EMC World in May.

In his blog, Hollis said one possibility for such a network would be "to seriously consider moving thousands of VMs over thousands of miles. Or you could easily play the market on energy costs by moving workloads to where they're most efficient to run."